Seeping Matter

In Stephen R. Covey’s book “The 8th Habit” he describes an experiment he often conducts when he is teaching an audience.  On page 117 of my copy he writes,

“I invite a man who looks very strong and healthy to come up in front and do twenty straight-back push-ups.  If he is truly strong and practiced, he can do it fairly easily.  But very few can; even many who appear strong and healthy hardly make it past five or six.”

This statement really surprised me.  Is it really that uncommon for men to be able to do more than just a few pushups?

So I mentioned this to my wife Amber, and she said that I ought to do a survey to see how many people really can do.  Thus challenged, I created a simple survey on Facebook that I invite you to take.  I promise to never reveal any individual results (likely, Facebook won’t expose them anyway), but please take a bit of time to help me out.  Find a minute, one morning or just before you go to bed.  Don’t work your way into it, don’t practice for a month or anything.  Just drop down and see how many you can do, and then submit your results in the survey.

I’ll run the survey until the end of January and then summarize what we find with a post at the end of the month.

Again, here’s the link to the survey: here

The wife of a good friend of mine is a very accomplished song writer, which, as anyone who knows me well can confirm, is a talent I greatly admire.  I can play the piano pretty well and can also create something resembling music on the guitar, but writing songs is a completely different matter altogether.  My uncle once wrote a song you have never heard called “Natalie” that I thought was pretty awesome.  So if it is awesome to write a good song that nobody has heard, how much more admirable to write good songs that lots of people hear and like.

My friend told me that she’d told him about the difference between writing popular music and just writing what you feel.  She even has taught people about this before, that if you want to write music for yourself that’s one thing, but the way to achieve success as a musician is to follow a prescribed formula which is proven to create music that will be mainstream and popular.  I don’t blame her for teaching this because I think she’s identified a sad truth:  It is much easier to be mainstream.

Amber and I were waiting for some sandwiches the other day at Jimmy John’s when Kansas’ “Carry On Wayward Son” came playing over the radio in the store.  As I was complimenting the staff at the store for playing such an excellent radio station, I got to thinking about that song.  When you consider the rhythm of that song, the beat of the main riff or the bridge, or even the way Steve Walsh wails “Don’t you cry no mo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-o-o-o-oo-oore!!!” after the last chorus, you would have to agree that this song is anything BUT mainstream.  It is unique and one-of-a-kind, and truly epic.

I commented to Amber, “Consider the risk involved in the way he sings the last part of that song.  There is no holding back.  There is no halfway.  He’s putting everything out there, singing that with all the energy of his soul.  He’s completely opening himself to criticism and ridicule for singing that part that way.  And that’s what makes the song so awesome.”

I wondered since how this applies to life.  How many of us intentionally live mainstream lives just trying to fit in and not cause any issues, instead of taking the risk to be epic?  How many times do we just go along with the flow, trying to be just like everyone else, making low-risk, low-return choices instead of putting ourselves out there and seeing what our lives could really be like?

Some ways to do this:

• Blog – and say what you really think
• Write a book
• Take a day trip
• Redecorate
• Play an instrument
• Learn a new skill or hobby
• Make a movie
• Take your kids on an adventure
• Do almost anything besides watching TV

I’ve been thinking a bit more about my last post and trying to reconcile all of this in my own mind.  There’s two conflicting trains of thought here.

The first is what was reflected in the post and the attached video, and what has been additionally mentioned in a lot of self-help, success, and business literature (like the excellent book “First Break All The Rules”), which is this:  A key to greatness is to identify what your strengths are and capitalize on your strengths.  Focusing your effort instead on your weaknesses is unwise because:

• It has the effect of driving you toward perfect mediocrity because as you shore up your weaknesses to take them from poor to average, you neglect nurturing your strengths which causes them to deteriorate from great to average, and thus you become capable in many areas but not a standout in any of them.
• As a side effect you never know what you could accomplish with your greatest strengths because you don’t have enough time to focus on them since you are too busy working on your weaknesses, which is likely to take a lot more effort to achieve marginal results.
• Frustration is the dominant emotion because you don’t spend nearly enough time killing it doing stuff you are good at, and instead you spend a lot of time feeling like you are swimming in a tar pit, experiencing continual ineptitude and even failure trying to work in your areas of weakness, which is exacerbated by the knowledge that you are really excellent at other things that you would rather be doing.

The other side of this conflict comes from some core foundational beliefs based in religion.  When Jesus Christ was on the earth his expectation was set forth in clear and unmistakable language:  ”Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).  Is there room in a perfect person for weaknesses?  Further, in the Book of Mormon, the Savior implores us to come to him to address our weaknesses, saying, “If they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them” (Ether 12:27).

It seems pretty clear that, despite conventional “wisdom,” we are actually expected to address our weaknesses.  But we still have to live and function in the world, which requires at least some modicum of success as well as trying to enjoy the life we have.

Where I settled on this issue is that addressing weaknesses is meant to be a personal issue.  It is one thing to know that I need to work out more and decide on my own to try to address this weakness while my wife patiently and lovingly supports my efforts and remains focused on the one or two things I do well in our marriage.  It is another thing completely if she is always pointing out to me how fat I’m getting, how I’m not getting into shape, and reminding me how much it is hurting our marriage because I won’t get my act together.  In the first case I feel supported and that I’m succeeding while trying to improve.  In the second case I feel that I can’t do anything right and that I’m drowning in failure after miserable failure.  Luckily for me, the first situation describes my marriage and family, where I feel blissfully happy all the time because my family appreciates the things I do well.  The number of shortcomings greatly outnumbers the good things, but I know what they are and feel supported in addressing them at my own pace.

Maybe that is why in “First Break All The Rules” they encourage managers to focus and build atop their employees strengths and manage around their employees weaknesses.  It isn’t that the employees shouldn’t address their weaknesses, but how and when they do this should be their decision.

A very early memory of mine is walking with my mom to the church down the street on a Saturday morning before Easter Sunday to participate in an Easter Egg hunt.  Way back then the local church would put on quite a hunt with certainly hundreds of eggs placed around in the rather expansive gardens outside the church.

I was probably only maybe four years old at the time.  All the kids would line up and go look for eggs together on the “Go” signal.  Mom helped me find a neighbor boy, a friend of mine who was a couple of years older than me, to stand by and feel more comfortable while we waited to start.

On “Go,” we all headed off to search for eggs.  I followed my friend around, just a few paces behind him as we did the hunt.  Everywhere he went, I followed.  He would look under a bush, I would look under the bush.  He would look next to the wall, I would look next to the wall.

Mom observed all of this, going on for maybe 20 minutes, as I searched everywhere my friend searched right after he’d searched there.  It was no surprise at the end that my friend’s basket was overflowing with eggs while I’d found only three or four.

Mom put on her sympathetic face and probably gave me a hug or something.  She said, “Matt, you can’t expect to find a lot of eggs if you search where everyone else is searching.”

I remembered that well.  The next year, I didn’t follow my friend.  I searched where nobody else was searching.  At the end my basket was overflowing; I seem to recall counting 20 eggs.

The next year, they had budget cuts and they canceled the Easter Egg hunt, and they’ve never done it again.

Still, I’ve remembered that lesson my whole life.  I’ve used it in pretty benign situations, like trying to find a parking spot at the mall during the holidays.  But lately I’ve been using it a lot more for more significant things, like my career.

There’s a really interesting part in the book “Linchpin” where he addresses the desire of readers to have explicit instructions on how to become a great leader.  I can relate to this desire also.  Seth Godin makes a great point in the book:  If you are trying to become a linchpin, and part of being a linchpin is being a leader, how can you possibly expect someone to give you instructions on how to get there?  If there are instructions to follow, this implies you are a FOLLOWER, not a LEADER!

It’s unfortunate that it’s taken me such a long time to internalize a lesson I was taught when I was so little, but I’m kinda pleased that I seem to be getting it now.  But in case you don’t believe me or Seth Godin, maybe you’ll believe Robert Frost.  He also taught us this lesson using different words:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the road less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Despite what some might think, not every moment I worked at Novell was torment.  In fact, most of my time there was pretty good.  But I admit there was a time when I got pretty discouraged.

It was some time after we’d shipped Novell Forge.  Multiple attempts to expand the scope and vision of Novell Forge had been thwarted when I’d repeatedly failed to make a good enough case to invest further in it.  The Developer Services organization was growing smaller and smaller, through layoff and attrition — Novell, sadly, never really did understand the need to invest in their developer community.  I’d been reassigned to a new team from a boss I really liked, and had been given what seemed like a busywork assignment.

I used to joke back then that I could prove I was the least important employee at Novell.  First, organizationally:  Developer Services was surely the most underappreciated and least important organization in all of Novell, and of all the assignments in our organization, mine was the lowest priority assignment.  This part I’d actually confirmed with my management, who had presented a slide deck with our ongoing objectives listed on one slide and those we’d rejected on a subsequent slide.  I’d verified that the first slide listed the accepted objectives in priority order, and my assignment was last.

Second, geographically:  You could (jokingly, of course) judge an employee’s importance by a) how close their building was to campus center, b) what floor they were on (higher floors being more important), and c) how close their office was to the corners and edges of the building (corners, then outside walls, being more important).  Since my office was the ONLY office not on an outside wall on the bottom floor of the building farthest from campus center, I’d joke that this also proved I was the least important person at Novell.

So I joked about it, but also wondered most days whether it really mattered if I came to work at all.  Did anyone care if I showed up?  Did anyone care if I left early?  Did anyone care if I actually accomplished anything during the day?  Did my assignment really matter at all?

I kinda wallowed around in this mire for some time, still coming to work and going through the motions, but wallowing anyway.  I thought about leaving Novell but nothing really materialized.  I’d heard all my life that you should love your job; shouldn’t I be finding a place to work that I loved?

Then one day it finally hit me:  Instead, shouldn’t I be loving the job I have?

I realized that, regardless of the importance of my work to the company, I could make it important to myself.  I vowed that I would take a lot more pride in my work, that I would try to deliver software of high quality and craftsmanship regardless of the assignment I was given, and that I would find other ways to get involved.  I started delivering better on my project.  I created a new technology.  I worked with some great guys at Red Hat to start a new Eclipse subproject.  I got involved with Novell’s Software Development Community of Practice and eventually became one of the practice leaders and one of Novell’s primary thought-leaders and bloggers around agile development methodologies.  I enjoyed my job much more and got an opportunity to move to a different team, a product development team, comprised of some great individuals whom I would never have gotten to know otherwise.

I’ve just finished reading Hugh MacLeod’s book “Evil Plans.”  One of the key phrases in that book is:  ”Life is too short not to do something that matters.”

I’ve been thinking about this and about me and my past and about tidbits I get from conversations with friends and things I pick up on Twitter and Facebook.  How many of us wake up every day with the sole goal of getting to the end of the day?  Every day?

What is it you are looking forward to?

When you wake up in the morning, are you most looking forward to about 16 hours from now, when you can go back to bed?  Or the time when the kids are finally asleep?

When you head in to work, are you most looking forward to noon, when you can take a break from work for an hour?  Or five o’clock, when it is time to go home?  Or the weekend?  Or summer vacation?

Isn’t that a waste, to spend so many hours of the day waiting for them to be past?

I realize that not all of us have our dream job.  But, as I learned, instead of yearning for your dream job and lamenting all the ways that your current job isn’t your dream job, you can also decide to love the job you currently have.  You can give more than you are currently giving — not more time, necessarily, but more heart, more care, more passion.  If you are a schoolteacher, you can yearn for summer vacation and lament those kids you have to put up with for such a low salary until then, or you can ignore the voices telling you how poorly you are paid and decide to make a difference in the lives of as many of your students as possible, a real difference, and find fulfillment in being the best in your profession.

And if you can do that with your job, if you can choose to love your current job instead of waiting until your dream job finds you, can’t you also do that with your life?  Can’t you also take the approach of choosing to give more heart and passion and care and love to the life you have instead of waiting for the life you want to come and find you?

The funny thing is, in my experience I found that as I gave more to my job, it started to become more like the job I wanted.  Things started to happen in my favor.  Opportunities came up that weren’t coming up before.

I’ve found this on other occasions as well.  At times when my career wasn’t heading quite where I wanted, choosing to care more and give more seems to get things moving again.  Things just start happening when you do that, somehow.

The best part, however, is that you have more days that are meaningful.  Each day is a day to give and add value and feel important.  You find meaning in your life every day when you stop worrying about all the things that aren’t working out for you and start finding ways to give.

Enjoy your job more by giving more of yourself at work.  Gain better friends by seeking opportunities to be a better friend.  Take time to read a book to your child, or play with the trains or Polly Pockets, or watch “Tangled” again even though you watched it yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, because they will not be little for long.

Make your days meaningful and live every day.  Don’t spend your days waiting for your dream life to happen to you.  You deserve better than that.

Recently this article, printed in the online version of Logan, Utah’s Herald Journal newspaper, was e-mailed to me as a point of personal interest.  It discusses Reed Cowan’s return to USU to screen his recent movie, “8: The Mormon Proposition”, and the post-screening open discussion that took place.

The reason why this is a point of personal interest is because Reed and I were friends in high school.  Today, for the record (and for context), Reed is a news anchor, filmmaker, and philanthropist.  He’s also anti-Mormon and a homosexual.  And, for my part, a friend.

Reed (Darrin back then) and I were pretty good friends, in fact.  We double-dated for both our Junior and Senior proms and on a number of other occasions.  We were both involved in a show-choir group, Reed for his talent and me because they needed additional men in the group.  He was generally well-liked as far as I can remember, especially by the girls in our high school.  We spent quite a bit of time together; I’m pretty sure I was considered one of his closest friends.

I don’t know if he felt same-gender attraction tendencies when we were in high school.  He never even hinted at this to me.  I’m willing to bet that if he felt this way back then, nobody else knew about it either.

Reed wasn’t really on the inner circle of the popular group of kids.  Neither was I, for that matter.  I can neither confirm nor deny any bullying or mistreatment towards him by other kids in our school.  I never witnessed anything beyond the normal things that the popular kids do to pretty much everyone else, in terms of teasing and belittling and gossip and backbiting.  I’m not aware of anything atypical, and I doubt it could have had anything to do with any same-gender attraction issues since I’m pretty sure nobody knew about it.  (For the record, that doesn’t make it right or acceptable.)

I spent a lot of time in Reed’s home when we were growing up.  I knew his mother and father and siblings.  I could not speak to the level of family functionality or dysfunctionality; from my view it seemed like a normal family.  Reed was raised a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) as was I.  He was not particularly active in our church while we were growing up, but later decided to become active and eventually chose to serve an LDS mission in Texas.

Reed was over 20 years old when he decided to serve a mission.  Most young LDS men leave on their mission at 19; by 20 if a young man hasn’t gone most people tend to think he’s decided not to go.  I say this to point out that by about 20 the pressure is off.  Reed made this choice on his own.

After his mission, Reed attended Utah State like I did and he lived with me and my other six roommates for a while.  At this time Reed clearly had strong positive feelings towards the LDS Church.  On more than one occasion he expressed to me and others his depth of conviction and belief in the teachings of the LDS Church.

I don’t say any of this to argue whether Reed’s current sexual orientation is a choice or a lifestyle decision, or whether he was born that way.  I do think it is important to point out a few things, however:

• If he felt this inclination while we were growing up, he never expressed it to me; and because we were close friends, I assume he never expressed it to anyone — at least not anyone outside his own family.  (If he were going to tell anyone, wouldn’t he tell a close friend first?)
• Based on that (admitted) assumption, I don’t think any mistreatment or bullying he may have experienced could be because of sexual orientation.
• Whatever Reed may choose to say about the LDS Church today, as recently as his early- to mid-twenties he held strong favorable views of the LDS Church, mostly achieved due to his own personal efforts at seeking spiritual enlightenment and fulfillment.

I guess what I’m saying is, in my experience being a good friend to him over a number of years, I did not witness or observe anything in either his sexual orientation or his religious behavior that would have led me to believe that he would someday publish a movie that was so openly pro-homosexuality and anti-Mormon.  Believe me, I’m not trying to imply that he did not feel this way back then; I’m simply saying that I, as one of his closest friends, did not observe it, and therefore, his movie on Prop. 8 surprised me.

I did, however, witness another behavior that can explain it.  In all that time, one thing I knew about Reed was that he wanted to be famous.  He was interested in news, journalism, filmmaking, movies, and the like from an early age.  I do recall on more than one occasion being concerned about his obsession for fame, when he would convey the feeling that he would do whatever he had to in order to be famous.

I, and other mutual college friends, witnessed a clear turning point for Reed when his opportunity for fame arrived.  It seemed to be no coincidence that opportunities in show business and broadcast journalism began opening up for him at the same time that he turned suddenly from the standards of the LDS Church that he had previously kept.

I can’t help but wonder if his angst toward the LDS Church comes not from adamant disbelief but from frustration:  Frustration at not being able to do whatever one wants with one’s life and yet still remain strongly affiliated with the church.  Many criticize the LDS Church for this, but it is no different than most other private organizations.  A labor union surely wouldn’t look too kindly on members who don’t pay their dues and who don’t agree with the union’s agenda.  An AA group would surely have issues with members who are making no effort at all to stop drinking.  Yet somehow, I guess because it is a church, it isn’t that uncommon for disaffected members to feel animosity toward the church when, after making choices that are not in harmony with membership requirements, they find themselves not strongly affiliated anymore.

There’s a strange irony in all this.

I lost contact with Reed after he left Utah to pursue his career.  Years passed, when suddenly I heard the tragic news of the accidental death of Reed’s son.  My heart broke at the thought of one of my friends suffering through the death of one of their children.  Since that time I have attempted on multiple occasions to reestablish contact with Reed.  I’ve sent multiple LinkedIn and Facebook connection requests.  All efforts have been ignored.  Yet I’ve read some of the things Reed has said lately about the LDS Church, implying that once he came out about his sexual orientation, he was ostracized by former friends and colleagues in the church.

My experience is the exact opposite — that once he came out about his sexual orientation, he ostracized me.

I wish he wouldn’t.  It is true that my faith is dear to me and I wish people wouldn’t have such strong animosity towards us.  It is true that I do not agree with his lifestyle choice, just as I don’t agree with the lifestyle choice of gossiping about one’s neighbor or the lifestyle choice of cheating on one’s spouse or the lifestyle choice of drinking alcohol.  However, it does not mean that I dislike the person pursuing any of those choices.  Particularly in the case of Reed Cowan, I still consider him a friend, and I miss him.  I wish he wouldn’t ostracize me anymore.  I’d like to have my friend back.

(For the record, I have NOT seen “8: The Mormon Proposition.”  I am aware of what it is about.  I don’t generally partake of any media that is known to be anti-Mormon.  I realize that this somewhat discredits this blog post, but I’ll live with it.)